Category: Talks

Sharvit Colloquium on Friday

This Friday, Yael Sharivit from UCLA will give the second colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Assessing two theories of clausal complementation”. The talk will take place on Friday, 10/27, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Her abstract is as follows:

Some clause-taking verbs can also take DPs (e.g., ‘believe’), some cannot (e.g., ‘think’), and some can appear without a complement (e.g., ‘groan’). The standard theory of complementation has to resort to lexical ambiguity to explain this. An alternative (due to Kratzer and others) says that “complements” of clause-taking predicates are not arguments, thereby offering a way to explain this variation without resorting to lexical ambiguity. I argue that this alternative fails to deliver the right truth conditions of certain attitude reports.

Bennett colloquium on Friday

This Friday, our own Ryan Bennett will give the first colloquium talk of fall quarter/school year, titled “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”.  The talk will take place on Friday, 10/13, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

His abstract is as follows:

Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable, gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement. Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to [C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).

Another successful LURC

LURC Presenters, standing in front of log in Stevenson CourtyardOn June 2, students and faculty in the department gathered for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). This annual conference celebrates the groundbreaking research of Language Studies and Linguistics majors and is always a highlight of the department’s academic year calendar. 

This year’s LURC was no exception, featuring nine posters on a range of topics in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, syntax, and semantics:

  • Cal Boye-Lynn, Killian Kiuttu, and Mackenzi Rauls: Everyone loves complements: Complementizer-determiner ambiguity and acceptability
  • Tony Butorovich, Claire Wellwood, and Max Xie: Production of English /r/ by prosodic position
  • Sophie Green, Shaya Karasso, and Josh Lieberstein: Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-questions
  • Nicholas Hanson: Conveyances of sarcasm in written language
  • Colin Hirschberg: Affectedness in passives
  • Sadira Lewis: Events and ambiguity in -er nominals: An experimental approach
  • Stephen Migdal: “At least,” QUD, and Pragmatic Enrichment of NNPs
  • Wilson Wenhao Sun: OT account for consonant clusters in Cantonese loanword phonology
  • Nishant Suria: A phonetic investigation of the retroflex approximant in Tamil

After brief presentations and a discussion period, the Distinguished Alumna Speaker Caroline Andrews (BA, Linguistics, 2011) spoke on “Optionality and commitment: Sentence planning in an ergative language.” Dr. Andrews received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

2023 Graduate Research Symposium

Symposium Presenters

Symposium presenters (from left to right): Matthew Kogan, Jun Tamura, Eli Sharf (not present: Jonathan Paramore and Elifnur Ulusoy)

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar (a.k.a. LING 290) culminated this year in a series of presentations by seminar participants on Saturday, April 15. The program included:

  • Eli Sharf “Identificational Appositives in English”
  • Jun Tamura “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes”
  • Matthew Kogan “The Role of Specifiers in a Content-Addressable Retrieval Mechanism”

Two other participants in LING 290 were unfortunately unable to present at this year’s symposium due to illness. Their planned talks were titled:

  • Jonathan Paramore “Codas are Universally Moraic”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy “The Role of Syntactic Connectivity in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the wonderful progress they’ve made on their research this year!

research symposium

Audience members attentively listening.

Rickford Lecture Re-Scheduled for February 28

John R. Rickford, who is J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at

Rickford

Professor John R. Rickford

Stanford University, will give a Stevenson College Distinguished Alumni Lecture on Tuesday, February 28 3:30-5:00 pm in the Stevenson College Library. (Note: This event was re-scheduled from the fall.) He will be speaking about his autobiography Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language. The lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, will be followed by a reception and book signing outside on the patio. 

Professor Rickford received his BA in sociolinguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1971, with highest academic honors and honors from Stevenson College. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1980. Professor Rickford’s research has been recognized by an American Book Award, a Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Association of America, and the Best Paper in Language Award, among other honors. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015.

 

Slugs at the LSA

Many past and present UCSC linguists will be presenting at the up-coming Annual Meeting of the LSA (6-9, January 2022). In chronological order:

Friday (January 7)

D-linking and the effects of contextual set restriction (poster session)

Yuki Seo^^ (University of Delaware) & Rebecca Tollan (University of Delaware)
^^UCSC exchange undergrad from Japan, 2016-17^^

The Development of Vowel Length as a Subphonemic Cue (in-person presentation)

Abigail Fergus (College of William and Mary), Kaitlyn Harrigan (College of William and Mary), & Anya Hogoboom** (College of William and Mary)
**PhD Alum**

Saturday (January 8)

The Irreducible Uncertainty of Ranking and Ordering (poster session)

Eric Bakovic^^ (University of California, San Diego) & Jason Riggle^% (University of Chicago)
^^UCSC BA^^ and %%MA%%

Pre-nominal mí in San Martín Peras Mixtec (poster session)

Lisa Hofmann~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Jason Ostrove** (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD student~~ and **PhD Alum**

Competence meets performance: New perspectives on information structure (hybrid presentation)

Andrew Hedding~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Morwenna Hoeks~~ (University of California, Santa Cruz)
~~Current PhD students~~

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